Velocity 2014 Schedule

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Etsy's continuous deployment and analytics capabilities have ushered in an era of continuous experimentation. The benefits to product development are huge, but present challenges for performance and front-end maintainability. This talk details the tools we've developed and cultural changes we've undergone to support continuous experimentation while maintaining high performance.

YouTube videos are playing 40% faster than last year. Come find out the modern front-end optimization techniques we used and how you can apply them.

2:00pm-2:40pm (40m)
Performance

Speed Kills: When Faster Pages Mean Less Revenue

Eddie Canales (CrossChx)

Faster pages...profit! Right? Despite what common sense and every case study might tell you, we found out that isn't always true. When you get 25 million visitors a month and make a lot of your money from advertising (the enemy of speed), you have tons of opportunity/obligation to understand which kinds of speed matter. This is a story about hope, disappointment, discovery, and triumph.

3:30pm-4:10pm (40m)
Performance

Is TLS Fast Yet?

Ilya Grigorik (Google)

TLS has exactly one performance problem: not enough sites are using it. Everything else can and will be optimized. In this session we'll look at the state of the art in available optimizations (latency and computation), support and configuration tips for popular servers and CDNs, plus more. TLS is not slow, it's unoptimized.

4:15pm-4:55pm (40m)
Performance

Assembly at the Edge

Gamaiel Zavala (Yahoo!), Pushkar Sachdeva (Yahoo!)

This talk will describe a large architectural change in serving within Yahoo! which entailed a split page assembly between the origin server and the edge server (Apache Traffic Server). Large pieces of the page are cached while smaller personalized chunks are fetched and assembled at the edge using Edge Side Includes (ESI).

While most everyone in web performance know of Navigation Timing - the W3C spec that launched a thousand RUM implementations - a newer and potentially more valuable spec called Resource Timing is now supported by major browsers. We will talk about Resource Timing and how it provides a real-world web page waterfall, and go over the incredible insights we've uncovered in our own Resource Timing data

11:20am-12:00pm (40m)
Operations

Days in Green (DIG): Forecasting the Life of a Healthy Service @Twitter

Vibhav Garg (Twitter), Arun Kejariwal (MZ)

High performance and availability are highly dependent on the capacity allocated to a service. The ability to forecast when a service is expected to be under capacity is key to maintaining an efficient and highly performing infrastructure. We present a way to statistically forecast the number of days a service can run before its performance is expected to degrade based on pre-determined criteria.

1:15pm-1:55pm (40m)
Operations

We’re Not Ready for the Internet of Things: How Current Technology Must Adapt First

Bryan Cantrill (Joyent)

Many expect the Internet of Things to finally take shape this year. But given the volume of data headed our way, the demands on infrastructure will greatly outpace its current capabilities. In this session, Joyent’s SVP of Engineering Bryan Cantrill, discusses how current technologies must adapt before performance capabilities can keep pace and deliver on the promise of the Internet of Things.

2:00pm-2:40pm (40m)
Operations

Instagration

Mike Krieger (Instagram)

Integrating Instagram into Facebook's Infrastructure

3:30pm-4:10pm (40m)
Operations

Self-Repairing Deployment Pipelines: What We Ought to Mean by Distributed Orchestration

Mark Burgess (Cfengine)

There are many tools for software building and what passes for process orchestration today, but two things are missing: a modern model-based approach, and the simplicity of the trusty "make" command, with handling of distributed dependencies. Mark Burgess shows how a promise-oriented approach, using CFEngine, can deliver both of these properties and more.

4:15pm-4:55pm (40m)
Operations

5 Things You Didn't Know NGINX Could Do

Sarah Novotny (NGINX)

You know NGINX is great as a webserver or a proxy, but there's so much more.

5:00pm-5:40pm (40m)
Operations

Human Confirmation Bias in Monitoring of Systems

Chris Baker (Dyn)

A treatment of the human element involved in operating, monitoring, and understanding complex systems. This talk follows an example driven approach at how individual or group bias can impact time to identify, time to mitigate, and time to resolve issues in a production system.

11:20am-12:00pm (40m)
Mobile

Scale and Adapt - How We Built Responsive BBC News

John Cleveley (BBC)

Over the last 2 years the BBC has been building a whole new News platform. Starting mobile first we've felt the pain and benefit of responsive design in a big organisation. This talk is a candid discussion of what worked but also the many lessons along the way.

1:15pm-1:55pm (40m)
Mobile

Testing Your Mobile App for Real-World Network Conditions

Doug Sillars (AT&T), Jennifer Leong (AT&T)

You never know where your customers will be using your mobile apps. With the high variability in mobile connectivity speeds and latencies, a good user experience will depend on how well you optimize network utilization. In this talk we'll look at tools to test your app in varying network conditions. We’ll also provide success stories for apps that have greatly improved mobile performance.

2:00pm-2:40pm (40m)
Mobile

Responding to RWD – A Case Study of Managing Change within the Enterprise

Nicole Harris (Nationwide), Brian Greene (Nationwide)

Effecting change in a large organization can be challenging; a bit like trying to steer a ship with a paddle. We will discuss how to influence processes inside a large organization while addressing the challenges and opportunities of how a responsive site is designed, developed, and tested.

3:30pm-4:10pm (40m)
Mobile

Delivering Optimal Images for Phones and Tablets on the Modern Web

Joshua Marantz (Google)

Evolving mobile hardware and networks have made it challenging for web sites to deliver an optimal experience to each client. If you send the same image to both a WiFi Retina tablet and a 3G phone, you compromise speed and bandwidth cost against image quality. We'll look at using HTML and CSS image markup, CDNs, HTTP caching directives, and how WPO can deliver a great UX with minimal effort.

The “best practice” list of client-side mobile optimization is pretty well-known: use optimized JavaScript, requestAnimationFrame, event throttling, GPU acceleration, and so on. In this talk, those best practices will be demonstrated in a series of practical user interface patterns, from a silky smooth kinetic scrolling example to the use of CSS 3-D to clone the infamous Cover Flow effect.

5:00pm-5:40pm (40m)
Mobile

Making Web Fonts Fast(er)

Ilya Grigorik (Google)

Fonts and typography are critical to good design, branding, and readability, plus they allow the text to be selectable, searchable, zoomable, and high-DPI friendly. In short, we need web fonts, and we need to optimize their delivery and use. In this session we'll survey the latest browser optimizations and APIs, plus share our experience of optimizing Google Web Fonts.

11:20am-12:00pm (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

Encouraging Girls in IT: A How-To Guide

Doug Ireton (Nordstrom), Jane Ireton (Ireton)

We all know about the gender gap in IT, with women only holding 25% of IT jobs,
but what can we *do* about it? In this session, Doug Ireton, Infrastructure
Engineer at Nordstrom, and his daughter Jane, age 7, will tell their story of
learning to program and creating engaging and cool electronics projects. You'll
leave with practical advice on teaching programming to girls.

We received ~9,300 responses from our 2013 DevOps Survey, more than 2x the number of respondents from our 2012 survey. This year we focused not only on what behaviors lead to higher IT performance, but took it one step further to try to understand how that correlates with improved business performance. We will share our insights from the survey, and posit that good IT means good business.

2:00pm-2:40pm (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

Case Study: How Shifting to a DevOps Culture Enabled Performance and Capacity Improvements

Greg Burton (Orbitz Worldwide), Ori Rawlings (Orbitz Worldwide)

Faced with a need to significantly increase capacity, we realized that the prevailing bottlenecks were not being addressed because they were conceptually beyond the scope of individual teams. This session covers how we pivoted to a DevOps mentality and what we found in the cracks between our organization's development and operations responsibilities, including a commitment to performance testing.

3:30pm-4:10pm (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

Living with OCD

Seth Vargo (Google)

Hi, I'm Seth, and I have OCD. But is that a bad thing? I continuously struggle with misplaced pointers, poorly indented code, unorganized resources, design decisions, and tests. I was considering medication until I realized all the awesome things my OCD does too! Learn how I my OCD shaves 11 minutes from each grocery trip, helps me spot anomalies and anti-patterns, and even lose weight!

4:15pm-4:55pm (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

Operational Costs of Technical Debt

Kurt Andersen (LinkedIn)

Technical debt can be as simple as not keeping up with new releases of FOSS software. Using experiences from LinkedIn's history of open source, Kurt will illustrate the tradeoffs between the "stick with an existing version" option or the "let's keep up to date" option. The goal is to help participants look at these choices for their own environments and be able to make informed decisions.

5:00pm-5:40pm (40m)
Culture & Organizational Change

The W's of Diversity: An Exploration of Systemic Problems in Technology

Julia Ferraioli (Google)

Explore the what, when, where, and why of some of the harder issues that face marginalized and underrepresented groups within technology. Increase your understanding of what your colleagues face on a day to day basis, hear about real world examples, and learn how you can help nurture an equal and healthy environment for your teams and user groups.

11:20am-12:00pm (40m)
Sponsored

Beauty or the Beast: The Tale of Your Mobile App

Rob Kwok (Crittercism)

When it comes to performance, do you know whether your mobile app is a “beauty” or a “beast”? The truth may surprise you. While critical to every business, few companies have a solid grasp of how well their app functions in the wild. Crittercism CTO, Rob Kwok, will provide attendees with a robust look at surprising, current, and relevant industry benchmark data on the performance of mobile apps.

1:15pm-1:55pm (40m)
Sponsored

Content Acceleration Beyond Caching, Understanding Dynamic Content

J Mac (CDNetworks)

The Internet was not designed to support the fast delivery of website applications. And technologies designed to improve Internet performance – including caching, content delivery, and intelligent routing – do not adequately address the performance requirements of dynamic, web-based applications.

2:00pm-2:40pm (40m)
Sponsored

Mobilizing Your Website: Performance and Protection in a More Mobile World

Doug McCausland (AT&T Global Business Services)

In this session, we will discuss the many tools now available to optimize the mobile experience and to enhance the security of your content, your infrastructure, and your users, along with the ways security can help ensure and improve website performance and responsiveness for anyone visiting your websites.

3:30pm-4:10pm (40m)
Sponsored

Cracking the Code on Big Data with CA APM

Matt LeRay (CA Technologies), Anand Akela (CA Technologies)

The value of Big Data is in our ability to store, retrieve, and process information. Ultimately it’s the ability to make sense of virtually anything—including all types of random data patterns— so we can make better business decisions.

4:15pm-4:55pm (40m)

Session

To be confirmed

5:00pm-5:40pm (40m)
Sponsored

Pub Side Chat: Beers and DNS - Using our Old Friend DNS to fix Security and Performance Problems

Sean Leach (Fastly)

Today, DNS is one of those overlooked “it-just-works” components of a fast and secure Internet. What folks fail to realize is that it is a critical piece of keeping a site working. During this conversation, we will discuss the future of DNS and some of the common performance and security problems it can solve, all while enjoying a hosted happy hour.

11:20am-12:00pm (40m)
Sponsored

Accelerate Your User Experience with Client-side JavaScript

Joe Wells (Intuit Inc.)

The Intuit QuickBooks Online (QBO) developer team released a new version of QBO with rave reviews for its user experience, all built with client-side JavaScript. Join us for a session to learn the optimizations the team made in the experience design, the code, and the developer workflow.

1:15pm-1:55pm (40m)
Sponsored

Making the Web POSH

Jan-Willem Maessen (Google)

PageSpeed On Shared Hosting (POSH) is a new mode for mod_pagespeed and ngx_pagespeed that enables you to immediately and transparently reduce the bandwidth requirements of your site. If you don't use PageSpeed yet, POSH makes it easier than ever to get up and running quickly. If you're already running PageSpeed, come learn how POSH optimizations can help make your site even faster.

2:00pm-2:40pm (40m)
Sponsored

EdgeCast/Verizon's Ghostfish: How to Replay Production Traffic in Real-time

Amir Khakpour (Verizon EdgeCast)

For a CDN, production traffic implicitly includes a diverse set of characteristics that can be used in many domains. In order to study and use this traffic, we need to mirror it by replaying the traffic in a test environment while we preserve all these diverse features. Ghostfish is the framework we build in Verizon, designed to sample the production traffic and replay it in the test environment.

3:30pm-4:10pm (40m)
Sponsored

Look inside the Dropbox

Andrew Fong (Dropbox)

Dropbox is used by over 275 million people to store their valuable data. In this talk we will go over the evolution of the monitoring framework at Dropbox and what it was like to take monitoring and alerting from a team of 8 to a service that supports an engineering team in the hundreds.

Program Chairs, Steve Souders, Courtney Nash, and John Allspaw, open the second day of keynotes. More Keynotes to come.

9:05am-9:25am (20m)

Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler

Scott Hanselman (Microsoft)

How does the pervasiveness of JavaScript on the client change how we architect applications? We can create hundreds virtual machines in the cloud, but we are using the millions of visual machines that visit our sites every day?

9:25am-9:30am (5m)

Test Driven Mobile Development with Appium, Just Like Selenium

Jonah Stiennon (Sauce Labs)

Thursday Lightning Demo

9:30am-9:35am (5m)
Sponsored

Top 10 Lessons Learned Building PageSpeed and trying to Make The Web Fast

Joshua Marantz (Google)

Making the web fast feels like boiling an ocean, but that hasn't stopped us from trying.

9:35am-9:40am (5m)
Sponsored

Web Performance, Why it Really Matters

Hala Al-Adwan (Verizon EdgeCast)

We all know web performance is important, but the larger business and social community often see it as esoteric. In this brief presentation, Hala Al-Adwan will talk about why optimizing web performance matters -- often critically -- to the entire world.

9:40am-10:00am (20m)

Mobile Web is Not (Just) a Technical Challenge

Lara Hogan (Kickstarter)

We will walk through the growing importance of building for mobile web as users may be on any device, platform or connection. This talk will cover Etsy's evolution of the mobile web team from its inception in 2011 to its changing role today and how we shifted Etsy's engineering culture to empower and incentivize others to care about mobile web in their daily work.

While URLs were intended to consistently identify a resource location, this simple definition simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Between the complexity of device properties, different browser capabilities, failover needs, and geo-based content changes, we often need the same URL to be handled differently, based on the situation.

10:25am-10:30am (5m)
Sponsored

Software Analytics for Performance Nerds

Patrick Lightbody (New Relic)

Performance tuning is hard, if only because it never truly ends. So after you’ve tackled the obvious stuff like asset compression and SQL tuning, where do you focus next? See how you can use New Relic’s new Software Analytics suite of products to help you identify the long tail of optimization work that brings the most value to your bottom line.

10:30am-10:35am (5m)
Sponsored

Building Self-Adaptive Autonomous Infrastructure with an Advanced Monitoring Architecture

James Colgan (Rackspace)

This lightening talk will show you how to build a self-adaptive autonomous infrastructure to get out of DevOps fire drills and focus on the business value you deliver to customers. You will learn the high-level architectural components you need to make your infrastructure resilient in an increasingly unpredictable age.

10:35am-10:40am (5m)
Sponsored

A 5 Minute Checklist for Application Monitoring

Ernest Mueller (Copperegg)

Are you prepared for the rapid evolution of the application ecosystem? Join this session to learn what you need to know when monitoring production, business critical applications that leverage today's multi-cloud technologies.

10:45am-11:20am (35m)

Break: Morning Break - Sponsored by Neustar

12:00pm-1:15pm (1h 15m)
Event

Thursday Lunchtime Birds of a Feather

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions are informal roundtable discussions happening during lunch on Wednesday, June 25 and Thursday, June 26. You can join any BoF table or start your own with a topic of your choice. The BoF sign-up board will be near the Registration area.

2:40pm-3:30pm (50m)

Break: Afternoon Break - Sponsored by EdgeCast

8:00am-9:00am (1h)

Break: Coffee

5:40pm-6:40pm (1h)
Event

Closing Reception (Sponsored by SOASTA)

Join us poolside at the Terra Courtyard at the Hyatt after sessions on the last day of Velocity for a Closing Reception, sponsored by SOASTA. Learn about the latest innovations in SOASTA RUM and make those last connections before leaving the conference. To add to the festivities, there will be RUM cocktails, appetizers and prizes to enjoy.